Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Teaser Tuesday, Nov 9

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

- Grab your current read- Open to a random page- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I've got two teasers for this week! My first teaser: a giveaway! This Thursday I'll be reviewing Heidegger's Glasses; on Monday, I'll be posting an interview with the author, Thaisa Frank. Comments on both will count as entries toward a giveaway for a copy of Heidegger's Glasses. I hope you'll stop by! (I did a previous Teaser Tuesday from it -- such a great book!)

This week's teaser is from Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. It's a super hip book at the moment, and it might be too hip for me. I'm enjoying it -- it's very satirical -- but it also has this fetish for Asian women thing that I find a bit gross. (Maybe it's supposed to be satirical too? I'm not sure yet.)

Set in the ambigu-future, the story alternates between the electronic diary of Lenny, the hero, and the emails of his love interest. In this scene, Lenny is recounting his last days in Rome before he returns to the US.

I went to the U.S. Embassy.

It wasn't my idea to go. A friend of mine, Sandi, told me that if you spend over 250 days abroad and don't register for Welcome Back, Pa'dner, the official United States Citizen Re-Entry Program, they can bust you for sedition right at JFK, send you to a "secure screening facility" Upstate, whatever that is.

Now, Sandi knows everything -- he works in fashion -- so I decided to take his vividly expressed, highly caffeinated advice and headed for Via Veneto, where our nation's creamy palazzo of an embassy luxuriates behind a recently built moat. Not for much longer, I should say. According to Sandi, the strapped State Department just sold the whole thing to StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company, and by the time I got to Via Veneto the enormous compound's trees and shrubbery were already being coaxed into tall, agnostic shapes to please their new owners.

5 comments:

My sudden and unexpected return to Seattle was about to trigger a chain of events which completely change my life. Three months from this date my career, my life in San Francisco with my daughter and everything I had known before would be radically altered.

I <3 givaways more 'n my luggage! Even if I don't win, hopefully I can tease people into reading No Stars, Full Dark. Even though this teaser isn't from that.

I am currently working my way through The Dome, by King. For a book that weighs more than both of my cats combined (that's not hyperbole), it's going quickly!

#1: The north end of the McCoy farmhouse was useless--thanks to the previous winter's heavy snow, the roof was now in the parlor--but there was a county-style dining room almost as long as a railroad car on the west side, and it was there that the fugitives from Chester's Mill gathered.

#2 "I hated those flying lessons from the first," he said and began to cry again.

Unabridged Chick: Enthusiastic Book Reviews and other very personal opinions.

I'm married to a former seminarian, so pretty much all the Christian books belong to her. Definitely all the Bibles. I'm the more pagan one although ...more I'm Audra, a 30-something married lesbian (and new mom!) with a thing for literary fiction and historical novels. But I'm also having a pretty torrid affair with gritty noir and some paranormal /supernatural fiction. I love interesting heroines, gorgeous prose, place as character, and the occasional werewolf.